With this auspicious debut collection, B.C. writer and teacher Mitchell Parry demonstrates an ear for the richness of language, an earthy, solid poetics, and a keen insight into emotional truths both large and small. Tacoma Narrows bridges the external and the internal worlds, the macro and the micro, and the private and the public with a deft ease that belies the considerable skills at its core.

This bridging (pun intended) is most in evidence in the long title poem. Parry, who divides his time between Victoria and Pender Island, combines an account of, and meditation on, the historic collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940 with a lyrical rendering of his father’s death. “The rubble is meaningless, it tells us only/that things end the way we expect,” Parry writes in a series of lines so plainspoken, so seemingly raw and unmediated, that they cut deep.

The collection is united by themes of tragedy and resilience. Death and loss, failure and frustration abound. Even a seemingly pastoral lyric like “On Sparrow Song” is suffused with loss, drawing in such tragic figures as Nick Drake and Edith Piaf, exploring physical and emotional pain, the iciness of death, and the silence of sparrows. It’s a haunting poem, one of many in Tacoma Narrows, and it shapes the awareness and the reading of the other poems in the volume. “Sang d’encre” picks up the images and themes, solidifying for the reader a sense of loss and grief, of survival and perseverance.

Tacoma Narrows is a wintry collection, cold in body and soul. Yet there is a sense throughout of spring to come, moments of small joy against the backdrop of such sorrow. Unlike many collections, Tacoma Narrows benefits from being read as a whole, with each poem a crucial piece of the mosaic. Read in this manner, the volume is surprisingly uplifting, sadness given wing by Parry’s precise, occasionally transcendent use of language. It’s a most impressive piece of work.